The Oxford Inklings: Lewis, Tolkien and their circle

By Colin Duriez

The Oxford Inklings tells the story of the friendships, mutual influence, and common purpose of the Inklings, the literary circle which congregated around C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Meeting in pubs or Lewis's college rooms, they included an influential array of literary figures. They were, claimed poet and novelist John Wain, bent on the task of redirecting the whole current of contemporary art and life. Tolkien and Lewis expert Colin Duriez unpacks the Inklings' origins, relationships, and the nature of their collaboration. He shows how they influenced, encouraged, and moulded each other. Duriez also covers the less celebrated Inklings, neglected, he claims, for too long. What did they owe and offer to the more acknowledged names? What brought them together? And what, eventually, drove them apart from their initial focus upon each other's writings?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lion Books
• Release date: Nov 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9780745957920

Colin Duriez

Colin Duriez is an expert on C.S. Lewis, his writings and also his wider circle. He is also the author of the popular biography C.S. Lewis: A biography of friendship and J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend (both published by Lion Hudson). He has also written widely on other aspects of Lewis, Tolkien and the other members of the Inklings, and has contributed to conferences, lectures, DVDs and documentaries on these subjects.

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Text copyright © 2015 Colin Duriez

This edition copyright © 2015 Lion Hudson

The right of Colin Duriez to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Lion Books

an imprint of Lion Hudson plc

Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road,

Oxford OX2 8DR, England

www.lionhudson.com/lion

ISBN 978 0 7459 5634 3

e-ISBN 978 0 7459 5792 0

First edition 2015

Acknowledgments

Evert effort has been made to trace the original copyright holders where required. In some cases this has proved impossible. We shall be happy to correct any such omissions in future editions. For full acknowledgments please see p. 288.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover images © Max Dannenbaum/Getty; Jill Ferry/Corbis

TO LEICESTER WRITERS’ CLUB

Excellent! This is one of the best books on the Inklings I’ve ever read.

Walter Hooper, literary advisor to the C.S. Lewis Estate

No subject fascinates me as much as the creative interaction of the Inklings, and I am glad to read this new account. It is a brisk and honest retelling of the group and its members, always mindful to connect the Inklings and their ideas to their larger context. It is Duriez’s best book to date. I recommend it.

Diana Pavlac Glyer, author of The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community

"With The Oxford Inklings, Colin Duriez takes us deeper into the world of the Inklings than the commonly known facts about the writers to see how their scholarly work shaped their imaginations and their popular writing. Few people know the Inklings as intimately as Duriez who makes us feel as though he has just come from a morning with them at the Eagle and Child."

Harry Lee Poe, author of The Inklings of Oxford and C.S. Lewis Remembered

"This is a valuable addition to Inklings studies, suitable both for beginners and for more seasoned readers. For those who don’t know too much about the Inklings, Duriez provides a readable and well-rounded overview of the lives and works of Lewis, Tolkien, and their friends who comprised this famous literary band of brothers. Duriez is well-known for his thorough and diligent research, so this book also offers surprising and delightful insights even for readers who are familiar with earlier studies of the Inklings. The Oxford Inklings is enjoyable and enlightening for readers of all levels!"

David C. Downing, author of The Most Reluctant Convert and Looking for the King

Here Colin Duriez extends his early excellent work on the friendship of Lewis and Tolkien to an examination of the mutually supportive relationships of all the Inkings in context. There is a particularly useful chronology of their friendship and creativity. This is a comprehensive exploration of inter-Inklings relationships in which Duriez’s research is of its usual depth and quality and written in lucid prose that is a pleasure to read. It has the right emphasis, in Lewis’ words, on the Inklings’ ‘merriment, piety, and literature.’

Revd Dr Jeanette Sears

"In this book, Colin Duriez offers readers an engaging, thoughtful look at the fascinating group of writers known as the Inklings. Building upon previous studies by Humphrey Carpenter, Diana Glyer, and others, Duriez brings new insights to bear as he contextualizes the thought and work of the Inklings, illuminating what drew them together as well as the profound yet still elusive influence they had upon each other. The Oxford Inklings is a worthy addition to the shelves of all who love the writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their friends."

Marjorie Lamp Mead, Associate Director, The Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois, USA

"Just when I thought nothing new could be said about Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, Williams, and the others, gifted author Colin Duriez presents fresh and fascinating insights that I will remember long after I place The Oxford Inklings on a shelf among my treasured favourites."

Carolyn Curtis, author, editor, speaker, whose latest book is Women and C.S. Lewis – What his life and literature reveal for today’s culture

Some previous books by this author relating to the Inklings:

Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings: A Guide to Middle-earth (2001) Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship (2003)

A Field Guide to Narnia (2004)

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend (2012) Amazing and Extraordinary Facts: J.R.R. Tolkien (2012)

C.S. Lewis: A biography of friendship (2013)

The A-Z of C.S. Lewis: An encyclopedia of his life, thought and writings (2013)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION C.S. LEWIS AND THE DINOSAURS

CHAPTER 1 THROUGH LOVE AND BEYOND: CHARLES WILLIAMS, THE ENIGMATIC INKLING

CHAPTER 2 ROOTS AND SHOOTS: FRIENDS WHO WILL BECOME INKLINGS

CHAPTER 3 THE 1920S: OXFORD, WISTFUL DREAMS, AND A WAR WITH OWEN BARFIELD

CHAPTER 4 J.R.R. TOLKIEN RETURNS TO OXFORD AND C.S. LEWIS MEETS GOD

CHAPTER 5 THE BIRTH OF THE INKLINGS

CHAPTER 6 THE 1930S: WRITING BOOKS THEY LIKED TO READ

CHAPTER 7 THE WAR YEARS AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE INKLINGS

CHAPTER 8 THE CLOSE OF THE GOLDEN AGE

CHAPTER 9 THE FINAL YEARS

CHAPTER 10 AFTER THE INKLINGS

CHAPTER 11 JUST A GROUP OF FRIENDS?

APPENDIX 1 AN INKLINGS GALLERY

APPENDIX 2 A SELECT INKLINGS CHRONOLOGY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Photo Section

It is… easy to see why Authority frowns on Friendship. Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion… Hence if our masters… ever succeed in producing a world where all are Companions and none are Friends, they will have removed certain dangers, and will also have taken from us what is almost our strongest safeguard against complete servitude.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Preface

The Inklings were an influential group of writers, along the lines of the Lake Poets or the Bloomsbury Group, centred most notably on C.S. Lewis, and with J.R.R. Tolkien also at the core. They met regularly in the pubs of St Giles, Oxford to talk, and in the college rooms of Lewis at Magdalen College or Tolkien at Merton College to read and discuss their latest writings, and to talk more widely. My book explores their lives, their writings, their ideas, and most crucially the influence they had on each other. A defining purpose behind the group emerges that celebrates its diversity and lack of formality, based on a profound understanding of friendship. My book seeks to explain the mystery of how this eclectic group of friends, without formal membership, agenda, or minutes, came to have a purpose that shaped the ideas and publications of the leading participants.

Those who have enjoyed the now-famous writings of core members such as Lewis, Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams often find that the existence of the Inklings takes on a great importance for them. Questions then start to emerge: who else was involved with the Inklings, and why do Owen Barfield and Charles Williams matter so much? What difference did the Second World War make to the group, and why did they eventually stop meeting? This book explores the group’s complex and fascinating interactions both within and outside the circle. I also consider the Christian faith of the group’s members – of various, often surprising strands – which was a defining influence.

Although the Inklings were a literary group of friends, the membership was not made up exclusively of academics but included professional people from varied walks of life, from a doctor to a British army officer. The club existed in times of great change in Oxford, through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and petered out only with Lewis’s death in 1963. Tolkien occasionally referred to it in his letters, once describing the club as an undetermined and unelected circle of friends who gathered around C.S. L[ewis], and met in his rooms in Magdalen. Our habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and lengths!).

Almost thirty years earlier, Tolkien had written to his publisher, Stanley Unwin, about Lewis’s science-fiction story Out of the Silent Planet. He spoke of its being read aloud to our local club (which goes in for reading things short and long aloud). It proved an exciting serial, and was highly approved. But of course we are all rather like-minded. It is clear from Tolkien’s letters that the Inklings provided valuable and much-needed encouragement as he struggled to compose The Lord of the Rings.

Another member, Oxford Classics don Colin Hardie, wrote of the Inklings and its literary character in 1983, around fifty years after its inception: Oxford saw the informal formation of a select circle of friends, mostly writers or ‘scribblers’ (reminiscent perhaps of the 18th-century Scriblerus Club, whose members were Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, author of the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, and others…).

Most of the men in the circle of the Inklings were select friends of C.S. Lewis. It is inevitable, therefore, that there will be some overlap with the content of my book C.S. Lewis: A biography of friendship, which features a number of Lewis’s friends. In particular, I refer to certain events that are pivotal both to Lewis’s life and to the development of the Inklings as a group. I’ve done my best to keep any overlapping to the minimum. Where I’ve taken up material that is also in the biography of C.S. Lewis, it is here in an entirely different frame and setting. Thus the organization of each book is very different. Whereas accounts of Lewis’s friends in the biography serve to illuminate Lewis the man, and the development and shaping forces in his life, in my depiction of the Inklings, such accounts of friends are there to throw light on the group and its distinctive life and interactions as a community of friends.

I have been researching and writing on the Inklings for over forty years now, and this book draws on that work. Some contributions to essay collections or reference books are to be found in the bibliography. In 2000, my friend the late David Porter and I put together The Inklings Handbook, now long out of print. Even in the years since that book appeared there has been much new research on the group.

My own exposure to the Inklings was a process of gradual discovery. After reading C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity in class during my schooldays, I began reading everything I could find by the same author, little realizing the extent and range of his writings. Through this reading I gradually discovered Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and the existence of the Inklings. I also added to my reading other writers who had influenced them, such as George MacDonald. Their writings provided me with a key to why I liked so many other writers, many in the fields of science fiction and fantasy, but others where the connection was at first less clear, such as with William Golding and John Fowles. The list, like the road, goes ever on and on.

I mentioned that my interest in the Inklings has been long-standing, and as a result this book has inevitably been influenced by the work of others. Of those who have also written at length on the Inklings, particularly helpful have been Diana Glyer, Humphrey Carpenter, Gareth Knight, and Hal Poe. My visits to The Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, Illinois and the Special Collections Reading Room at the Bodleian Library in Oxford have been invaluable. Though long ago now, conversations I had with David Porter (often by telephone late at night) as we worked on our Inklings Handbook opened up the world of this extraordinary group of writers. As well as acknowledging my debt to those who have written on the Inklings, my thanks are also due to those who have been directly involved in the publication of this book, such as my editors, Ali Hull, Margaret Milton, and Helen Birkbeck, and also Jonathan Roberts, Leisa Nugent, Rhoda Hardie, and others at Lion Hudson.

Introduction

C.S. Lewis and the dinosaurs

In 1954, C.S. Lewis was at a turning point in his life. For nearly thirty years he had been a fellow and tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford. Though a popular lecturer with an impressive string of groundbreaking academic publications to his name, from The Allegory of Love, which came out in 1936, to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, published in 1954, he had been passed over several times for a Chair of English. In his personal life, it was over three years since Mrs Janie Moore, the woman he had looked after as devotedly as if she were his mother, had died, freeing him from a self-imposed burden of care. His brother, Warren, however, was falling into alcoholic blackouts with worrying frequency.

Lewis had also recently taken a change of direction in his writings, from a muscular intellectual defence of Christian beliefs as a high-profile apologist, to putting his creative energies into more overtly imaginative prose and fiction. The Chronicles of Narnia had flowed from his pen and also an autobiography, Surprised by Joy. This book focused upon an experience he called Joy, which had led him from atheism to a belief in God, and was soon to be published.

Then came an invitation from Cambridge University, offering him a newly created Chair of Medieval and Renaissance literature. Even before he was asked, the distinguished electors, who included two from Oxford (one of whom was his fellow Inkling J.R.R. Tolkien), had unanimously voted for Lewis as their first choice. Despite strong initial reservations, reflecting the swirl of issues he faced in his life at that time, Lewis was eventually persuaded to accept the post. Tolkien played a decisive role in persuading him. He could, Lewis found, remain living in Oxford but spend part of each week during term time living in his Cambridge college, in rooms large enough to house his essential library.

When Lewis presented his inaugural lecture in Cambridge on 29 November 1954 – his fifty-sixth birthday – he decided not to play safe. The public lecture gave him a platform from which to set out a defence of the Old Western or Old European values that he, along with Tolkien, had championed in their work, in both fiction and non-fiction. Both were central members of the Inklings, and the thrust of Lewis’s lecture might perhaps provide an initial insight into the heart of what the Inklings were all about. Were they reactionaries, standing against the flow of a new world that was being built according to a blatant modernist blueprint? Or was there a strategy in their concerns that could point to a different kind of contemporary world, rooted in old virtues and values? Could there conceivably be a modern society that was marked by continuity rather than discontinuity with the past? He donnishly called the lecture De Descriptione Temporum: a description of our time.

One friend of Lewis’s who wished to be at the lecture but couldn’t attend was Dorothy L. Sayers, of detective-fiction fame. She encouraged her brilliant friend Barbara Reynolds to attend, and Reynolds duly reported on it to her. On reading that report, Miss Sayers concluded that Lewis had been remarkably restrained! She replied to Barbara Reynolds: It sounds as though he had been on his best behaviour – he can sometimes be very naughty and provocative – but he probably thought that his Inaugural was not quite the moment for such capers.¹

Another female friend of Lewis’s, however, was there lending her support: Joy Davidman Gresham. She was an American poet and novelist who had come to live in England partly at least to further her friendship with him. At first, she had mainly been a very interesting pen pal. Later, she was to become his wife.

In a letter dated 23 December 1954, Joy Davidman described the lecture to a fellow American and friend of C.S. Lewis, Chad Walsh, as:

… brilliant, intellectually exciting, unexpected, and funny as hell – as you can imagine. The hall was crowded, and there were so many capped and gowned dons in the front rows that they looked like a rookery. Instead of talking in the usual professorial way about the continuity of culture, the value of traditions, etc., he announced that Old Western Culture, as he called it, was practically dead, leaving only a few scattered survivors like himself …

C.S. Lewis dramatically challenged the big division commonly made between the medieval period, which, as he saw it, had been discarded as having no relevance for life and culture today, and a forward-looking Renaissance. Privately he joked about whether he should have taken on the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance literature at the English School in Cambridge, as he believed that the Renaissance as it is commonly understood never happened! (In fact, the university had deliberately brought the two periods together in the newly created post, with C.S. Lewis in mind for it.) As an alternative, Lewis put forward what he considered to be the real break in Western culture, in the light of which the differences between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are overwhelmingly outweighed by the affinities between the two periods:

Roughly speaking we may say that whereas all history was for our ancestors divided into two periods, the pre-Christian and the Christian, and two only, for us it falls into three – the pre-Christian, the Christian, and what may reasonably be called the post-Christian… I am considering them simply as cultural changes. When I do that, it appears to me that the second change is even more radical than the first.

Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines… this is parallel to the great changes by which we divide epochs of pre-history. This is on a level with the change from stone to bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy. It alters Man’s place in nature.²

In the light of such a perspective, we can see that the fiction of his fellow Inkling, Tolkien, very much embodies the themes of Lewis’s lecture, even though Lewis offered generalizations of a scale Tolkien would rarely attempt, at least in public. Tolkien’s Old Western themes can be seen clearly, for instance, in the way he explored the related topics of possession and power. Possession is a unifying theme in his stories, from the craving of Morgoth – a high-ranking angelic being – to have God’s power of creation, to the temptation of wielding the One Ring that faced many protagonists in The Lord of the Rings. The wrong use of power is characteristically expressed by Tolkien in magic, embodied in the misuse of mechanism and technology. Morgoth, Sauron, and Saruman, all of whom embraced the dark side, experiment with genetic engineering – the creation of robot-like orcs – and use or encourage the use of machines created with the aim of extending their powers. The Ring itself is a machine, the result of Sauron’s technological skills. It is in fact a super-machine, which goes beyond incorporating an artificial intelligence to carrying and containing in some way much of its maker’s powers (or part of his soul, to use a different language).

Tolkien contrasts this evil magic with art, typified in the Elves, who have no desire for domination of others. Similarly, Lewis saw a machine-centred attitude, or technocracy, as the modern form of magic, seeking to control and possess nature for ends that turn out to be destructive of our very humanity, and he expressed this theme in his final science-fiction novel, That Hideous Strength.

In his inaugural lecture, Lewis defined the Old West by placing it in sharp contrast to our modern world. The Great Divide lay, he believed, somewhere in the early nineteenth century. It was as much a social and cultural divide as a shift in ideas and beliefs. On the other hand, Lewis saw positive values in pre-Christian paganism that prefigured the Christian values he so championed. That paganism belonged to a vast period of continuity that predated the Middle Ages and included the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome. He declared in his lecture that Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not. The post-Christian in our modern age of the machine, by being severed from the Christian past, is in consequence doubly cut off from the Pagan past.

Lewis brought his lecture to an end with a stunning piece of rhetoric that drove home his convictions about the past and the modern West, and his status as an Old Western Man within the new milieu:

It is my settled conviction that in order to read Old Western literature aright you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern Literature. And because this is the judgment of a native, I claim that, even if the defence of my conviction is weak, the fact of my conviction is a historical datum to which you should give full weight. That way where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.³

Joy Davidman observed, in her letter to Chad Walsh, that Lewis claimed the change to the Age of Science was more profound than that from Medieval to Renaissance or even Classical to Dark Ages, and that learning about literature from him would be rather like having a Neanderthal man to lecture on the Neanderthal or studying paleontology from a live dinosaur!.⁴

As a woman, Dorothy L. Sayers could never be part of the Inklings – even in the 1950s, when it was only a pub-based conversation group. However, she had an obvious affinity with Lewis’s mindset, as is clear from her letters. A few months after the inaugural Cambridge lecture, she concluded a letter to Jack with: All good greetings from your obliged and appreciative fellow-dinosaur. The warmth of her friendship is also revealed in the previous sentence, which playfully refers to Lewis’s Cambridge college, Magdalene: I hope the Lady who sits upon the Waters is gracious to you.⁵ The Lady is Mary Magdalene, and the Waters is a reference to the River Cam, beside the college.⁶

Lewis must have known that there would be a reaction to his lecture. As he no doubt expected, it did not go down well with an influential element at the university. They effectively saw the new professor (and perhaps even the new Chair) as a strategy from the murky depth of a stagnant backwater to revive the corpse of a lost Christendom. Ruffled, their response was lightning quick. Twentieth Century, in February 1955, devoted its entire issue to the unfolding disaster in Cambridge. Its twelve contributors, from a range of disciplines, were at one over the importance of free liberal, humane inquiry, which they conceive to be proper not only to a university community but to any group that claims to be civilized. Novelist E.M. Forster was one of them. He was indignant that religion was attacking humanism. By humanism, the contributors actually meant Orthodox Atheism, as Lewis saw it. E.M. Forster declared that humanism’s stronghold in history, the Renaissance, is alleged not to have existed.⁷ Lewis had blown the trumpet. The walls of